Why do you believe in God?

The Question: Why do you Believe in God?

Well I can only speak of my personal experience, not of Christian’s as a whole as there isn’t any one particular piece of proof or event or thing that ’causes’ every Christian to come to believe in God, at least not that I know of. My personal story of faith in God began a few years ago when my life took a change for the worse.

My best friend died in a motorcycle accident, and shortly thereafter I found out my marriage of 6 years was over. I had never felt so alone and betrayed and lost and angry as I did in those years. Now it’s not that I didn’t have great friends and family or other ‘good’ things going on in my life, but I just couldn’t seem to get rid of the anger and frustration and bitterness that had been building up over the course of my life and now was further fueled by these recent events. I was sick of the fake society and people in the world I lived in. The corporate greed mentality, the liars and cheats in politics, the ignorance, racism and violence that people just seemed to pretend wasn’t happening…

Nothing I seemed to do made any difference. I tried for several years to find any kind of peace on my own and I just ended up more bitter and angry as time went on despite doing all the things society claimed would make me happy and content. Eventually I came to the realization that it really didn’t matter what I did; how much money I made or the close friends I had or how my love life was, it didn’t change anything.

At that point I saw how a few people I knew at that time seemed to be really at peace regardless of their circumstances. The difference between us was they were trying their best to follow God, whereas I was just following myself; so I committed my life to God and it was the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.

I’m not saying my circumstances magically changed and I don’t still have problems or ever get angry or anything like that, but the differences emotionally and psychologically are just night and day. I was finally at peace and had purpose and something to look forward to each day, instead of just finding meaningless things to fill up my time with until I died.

So I guess you could say that what ’caused’ me to believe or to take that first step in faith was seeing the tangible difference between my life and the life of some people who were doing their best to follow God. 

 


 

This is a tricky question. I say this because I don’t think there is any ‘correct’ answer here, and the answers will vary from person to person because everyone has had a different experience. Additionally, belief in itself is at least in some part an act of faith. I can pile up evidence of a real God but that doesn’t mean the listener will believe because the bottom line is they have to choose for themselves. It cannot be scientifically proven or dis-proven that God exists.

Some may say something along the lines of, “Well my parents taught me from a child to believe in God and about faith and prayer and the whole deal and I saw God working in different ways throughout life and had different spiritual experiences and grew in my faith, etc, etc.” So essentially that is their experience with God and with being a Christian, more of a ‘belief through practice’ type of experience.

Another person might say, “Well I was healed miraculously from such and such disease after a believer prayed for me, etc, etc.” And that is what first sparked their belief, so their answer would be a ‘belief through event’ type of experience.

Either way though, I think that real belief in God stems from some type of experience or tangible thing that has occurred in our lives.

Any Christian who says they have never experienced anything from God or seen God work in their life of the lives of others, is, from my understanding, either ignoring what is going on, or not really following God.

Now I’m not condemning or saying that person is bad or anything like that, however I cannot believe that if someone is truly seeking after God that they are not seeing him work in some way around them, or not experiencing him working in them.

 

 

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